Allulose Lawsuits Hit Liquid Death, WK Kellogg And KIND: The FDA Green Light That Was Never A Defence

I will say this plainly. A promise not to enforce a rule leaves the rule exactly where it was. Chobani's Zero Sugar yogurt carries about 4 grams of allulose a serving. The line for a sugar free claim is half a gram.

That gap is now a legal problem for a growing list of food and drinks brands.

What the court actually decided

The case is Franco v Chobani. Two shoppers, Jason and Abigail Franco, bought Chobani Zero Sugar yogurt at a Costco near Chicago. They sued in May 2023. They said the front of the pack was false, because each serving held about 4 grams of allulose.

A district court threw the case out in 2025. Its logic was simple. The FDA had told firms they could leave allulose off the Nutrition Facts panel. Federal rules therefore blocked the state claims.

On 27 July 2026 the Seventh Circuit reversed that. The FDA filed its own view with the court and sided with the shoppers. The rule counts every simple sugar as sugar, and allulose is one. So a food cannot be sold as sugar free with more than half a gram in it.

Five brands in one week

The lawyers moved fast. On 24 August a shopper sued Liquid Death over the 0g Sugar line on its Sparkling Energy cans. Those cans hold about 2 grams of allulose. The same day, WK Kellogg was sued over a Zero Added Sugar claim on Special K. The maker of David protein bars was sued on that date too.

On 28 August it was KIND, over a Zero Added Sugar claim on four of its bars. KIND has been owned by Mars since 2020. Liquid IV has been named as well. The complaints read like copies of each other, because they are.

The rule the FDA never touched

In 2020 the FDA gave the trade a pass. Firms could leave allulose out of the sugar lines on the back panel. It also let them count 0.4 calories a gram. That guidance covered the Nutrition Facts panel and nothing else.

It never touched the front of the pack, where the money is. The rule on a sugar free claim sat untouched the whole time. So the back of a pack can be right and the front of the same pack wrong.

Firms read a green light on one panel as cover for the other. Lawyers at Morrison Foerster now tell clients the plain version. A choice not to act is no shelter from a private suit.

The maths does not work

Here is the part that makes this hard to fix. Allulose is a bulk sweetener, so it goes into a recipe by the gram. It does the work of sugar by weight. That is why product teams like it.

Chobani used about 4 grams. Liquid Death used about 2. The line in the rule is half a gram. That is eight times over and four times over. Nobody lands on those numbers by a rounding slip.

The fix is a different sweetener, and that changes the taste and the feel in the mouth. Those are the two things allulose was bought for. A brand that swaps it out gives up the reason it paid more.

What sold the pack now proves the case

The Liquid Death complaint leans on a 2021 survey by the International Food Information Council. Only 15% of people asked had ever heard of allulose. The argument is that shoppers trust the front of the pack rather than the small print.

Read that a second time. The same low awareness is what made the front claim worth printing. A shopper who cannot name the sweetener sees Zero Sugar and pays more for it. The gap in knowledge that sold the pack is now the proof that it misled.

Where this goes next

The Chobani ruling binds federal courts in three states. Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. Yet the new cases were filed in California and New York. Lawyers are treating the ruling as a template rather than a limit.

Two of the new suits go further. They attack Zero Added Sugar, which sits under a separate part of the rule. The Chobani ruling did not settle that part at all. Plaintiffs are already pushing past the ground they won.

The FDA could write a new rule and end the fight. It has had six years since the 2020 guidance and has not done it. For anyone selling a pack with a sugar claim on the front, waiting on Washington is a poor plan. Count the grams. Check every front panel against the rule. Price the risk before a court prices it for you.